With the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) standards making body deciding a week ago to speed up some aspects of its 5G New Radio (NR) schedule, AT&T now believes it will be able to start rolling out its standards based mobile 5G service by the later part of next year. As pointed out by Andre Fuetsch, chief technical officer of the major US wireless carrier (and also president of AT&T Labs), in a blog post, that target date is more than a year ahead of the expected timeline before the decision to expedite the standards.
During a 3GPP RAN Plenary meeting held in Croatia, over 40 signatories had voted to accelerate the non-standalone implementation of 5G NR, stating that doing so would help facilitate more big scale testing and roll outs based on the standard, beginning in 2019 rather than the widely expected 2020 time frame.
Fuetsch, however, is looking at a late 2018 timeline. He said that the next year or so will see AT&T make more announcements about its upcoming deployment of 5G fixed wireless and eventually standards based mobile 5G during the second half of 2018. The high ranking AT&T executive also revealed that the carrier is already joining forces with dozens of major players in the telecoms and tech industries in order to bring its 5G plans to life. He also indicated that AT&T has been one of the foremost North American wireless carrier contributors in helping the 3GPP try to establish specifications for 5G since early last year.
According to Fuetsch, around 137 petabytes of data on average are transmitted via AT&T’s network on a daily basis, with video content making up most of the data traffic. With the rapid increase in video very evident, being able to offer a 5G service is as critical to success as ever for the mobile operator.
As for its rival Verizon Wireless, the industry leader is also in the midst of testing its fixed wireless offering in 11 markets in the United States, and is expecting to debut its commercial fixed broadband service also by next year. But as far as mobile based 5G is concerned, the Big Red is looking at a time frame somewhere between late 2019 and 2020. Verizon’s approach has been to team up with ecosystem partners in its 5G Tech Forum (5GTF) in order to formulate its own standards that are independent from those of standards making bodies. But eventually, the carrier voted for the 3GPP 5G acceleration plan after disagreeing with it in the last few months.
